Visual, tactual, and olfactory representation in young children’s drawings : Intermodal transfer of perceptual information.

The present study investigated young children’s process of drawing especially focusing on the intermodal representations among touching, smelling, and seeing the concrete object (fruits or vegetables). And children given visuo-spatial imagery instruction were expected to activate visuo-spatial expression than other cross modal perceptual instructions as tactual-spatial or olfactory-spatial instructions. Thirty-six nursery school children aged 4 to 5 participated in this study. Every child was randomly assigned either to “tactual”, “olfactory”, or “visual” -spatial (perceptual) condition within blocks of six children in each age. The cross modal perception - expression (drawing) tasks were composed of 6 kinds of vegetables and fruits. Children in visuo-spatial condition showed higher expected activation of visuo-spatial drawing than other cross modal perceptual instructions as tactual-spatial or olfactory-spatial conditions. A series of results in this experiment were discussed in terms of young children’s development of cross modal representation (perception-expression) and cognitive and language abilities.